Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Authoring Dynamic Documents in IPython / Jupyter Notebooks?

One of the reasons I started writing the Wrangling F1 Data With R book was to see how it felt writing combined text, code and code output materials in the RStudio/RMarkdown context. For those of you that haven’t tried it, RMarkdown lets you insert executable code elements inside a markdown document, either as code blocks or inline. The knitr library can then execture the code and display the code output (which includes tables and charts) and pandoc transforms the output to a desired output document format (such as HTML, or PDF, for example). And all this at the click of a single button.

In IPython (now Jupyter) notebooks, I think we can start to achieve a similar effect using a combination of extensions. For example:

python-markdown allows you to embed (and execute) python code inline within a markdown cell by enclosing it in double braces (For example, I could say “{{ print(‘hello world’}}”);

hide_input_all is an extension that will hide code cells in a document and just display their executed output; it would be easy enough to tweak this extension to allow a user to select which cells to show and hide, capturing that cell information as cell metadata;

Readonly allows you to “lock” a cell so that it cannot be edited; using a notebook server that implements this extension means you can start to protect against accidental changes being made to a cell by mistake within a particular workflow; in a journalistic context, assigning a quote to a python variable, locking that code cell, and then referencing that quote/variable in a python-markdown might be one of working, for example.

Printview-button will call nbconvert to generate an HTML version of the current notebook – however, I suspect this does not respect the extension based customisations that operate on cell metadata. To do that, I guess we need to generate our outptut via an nbconvert custom template? (The Download As... notebook option doesn’t seem to save the current HTML view of a notebook either?)

So – my reading is: tools are there to support the editing side (inline code, marking cells to be hidden etc) of dynamic document generation, but not necessarily the rendering to hard copy side, which need to be done via nbconvert extensions?